When I read about “the role that movement seems to play even in abstract thinking,” it made me think of my presentation for the Imaging Place Conference last February, the PowerPoint slides for which are available at slideshare.net (there are two parts). In that talk I asked about how we might think differently given the use of 3-D virtual worlds. Now I’m thinking that I should have said how we can enhance or engage our embodied cognition by thinking in 3-D worlds.

Here’s an example. For a particularly abstract and complicated theory, we create an allegorical space in Second Life that allows the user to use his or her avatar to move through the space and thereby allow the engagement of embodied cognition (via mirror neurons) to facilitate comprehension of the subject.